The world in which Erik Dorn lived was compounded of many surfaces. Of them Anna, his wife, was the most familiar. It was a familiarity of absorption. Weeks of intimacy passed between them, of lover-like attentiveness during which Dorn remained unconscious of her existence. Her unending talk of her love for him—words and murmurs that seemed an inexhaustible overflow of her heart—passed through his mind as a part of his own thought. Hers was a more definite contribution to the emptiness of the life through which he moved.
Yet in his unconsciousness of her there lived a shadowy affection. On occasions in which they had been separated there had always awakened in him an uneasiness. In his nights alone he lay sleepless, oppressed, a nostalgia for her presence growing in him. With his eyes opened at the darkness of a strange room he experienced then an incompleteness as if he himself were not enough. The emptiness in which he was living became suddenly real. He would feel a despair. Words unlike the sophisticated patter of his usual thought would come to him.... "What is there ... I would like something ... what?..." Asense of life as an unpeopled vastness would frighten him vaguely. Night sounds ... strange, shadow-hidden walls. They made him uneasy. Memories then; puzzling, mixed-up pictures that had lost their outlines. Things that had left no impression on his thought—sterile little incidents through which he had moved with automatic gestures—returned like sad little outcasts pleading with him. Faces he could not remember and that were yet familiar peered at him in his sleeplessness with poignant eyes that frightened.
There would come to him the memory of the time he had been a boy and had lain like this in his mother's home, startled with fears that sat like insanities in his throat. The memory of his being a boy seemed to restore him to the fears long forgotten. Words would come ... "I was a boy ..." and he would lie thinking of how people grew old; of how he had grown old without seeming to change, and yet changing—as if he had been gently vanishing from himself and even now was moving slowly away. He was like a house from which issued a dim procession of guests never pausing for farewells. He had been a boy, a youth, a man ... each containing days and thoughts. And they moved slowly away from him—completed figures fully dressed. Slowly, without farewells, with faces intensely familiar yet no longer known. Thus he would continue to vanish from himself, remaining unchanged butdiminishing, until there were no more guests to forsake and he stood alone waiting a last farewell—a curious, unimaginable good-bye to himself. Nothing ... nothing. A long wait for a good-bye. And then nothing again. Already he was half shadow—half a procession of Erik Dorns walking away from him and growing dimmer.
In the dark of the strange room, his eyes staring and fearful, he would reach suddenly for Anna, embracing her almost as if she were beside him. Her smile that forever shone upon him like the light of lilies and candles from a sad, quiet altar; her words that forever flowed like a dream from her heart, the warmth of her body that she offered him as if it no longer existed for herself—to these his loneliness sought vainly to carry him. And he would find himself tormented by a desire for her, lying with her name on his lips and her image alone alive in the empty dread of his thought.
United again in their home, he lapsed into the unconsciousness of her, sometimes vaguely startled by the tears he felt on her cheeks as they lay together at night. Out of this unconsciousness he made continual love to her, giving her back her endearments and caresses. Of this he never tired. His kisses unaware of her, his tendernesses without meaning to him, he yet felt in her presence the shadow of a desire. The love that filled his wife seemed to animate his phrases with an amorous diction that echoed her own. He wouldhold her in his arms, bestowing kisses upon her, and watch as in wonder of some mysterious make-believe, the radiance that his meaningless gestures brought to her.
There were times, however, when Dorn became aware of his wife, when she thrust herself before him as a far-away-eyed and beautiful-faced stranger. He had frequently followed her in the street, watching her body sway as she walked, observing with quickening surprise her trim, lyre-like shoes, her silken ankles, the agile sensualism of her litheness under a stranger's dress. He had noticed that she had coils of red hair with bronze and gold lights slipping over it, that her face tilted itself with a hint of determination and her eyes walked proudly over the heads of the crowd. He watched other men glimpse her and turn for an instant to follow with their stares the promise of her body and lighted face. Dorn, walking out of her sight, got a confused sense of her as if she were speaking to the street, "I am a beautiful woman. In my head are thoughts. I am a stranger to you. You do not know what my body looks like or what dreams live in me. I have destinations and emotions that are mysterious to you. I am somebody different from yourselves."
On top of this sense of her had come each time a sudden vivid picture—Anna in their bedroom attaching her garters to the tops of her stockings; Anna tautening her body as she slipped out of hernightgown ... or a picture of her pressing his head against her breasts and whispering passionately, "Erik, I adore you." The strangeness then would leave her and again she was something he had absorbed. When he looked for her she had vanished in the scribble of the crowd and he walked with the same curious unconsciousness of her existence as of his own.
There were times too in their home when Anna became a reality before his eyes—an external that startled him. This was such a time now. Rachel had come to visit them. She sat silent, fugitive-bodied amid overfed, perspiring-eyed guests. And he stood looking at Anna and listening to her.
He wondered why he looked at Anna and not at Rachel. But his wife in black velvet and silken pumps, like a well-limned character out of some work of stately fiction, held his attention. He desired to talk to her as if she were a stranger. She sat without surprise at his unusual verbal animation in her behalf, listening to his banter with an intent, almost preoccupied smile in her eyes. While he talked, asking her questions and pressing for answers, he thought. "She's not paying any attention to my words, but to me. Her love is like a robe about her, covering her completely." Yet she seemed strange. Behind this love lived a person capable of thinking and reasoning. Dorn, as sometimes happened, grew curious about her thoughts. He increased his efforts to rivet her attention, as if he were trying to coax a secret outof her. The easiest way to arouse her was to say things that frightened her, to make remarks that might give her the feeling he had some underlying idea in his head hostile to their happiness.
The company of faces in the room emitted laughter, uttered words of shocked contradiction, pressed themselves eagerly forward upon his phrases. A red-faced man whose vacuity startled from behind a pair of owlish glasses exclaimed, "That's all wrong, Dorn. Women don't want war. Your wife would rather cut off her arm than see you go to war. And mine, too."
The wife of the red-faced man giggled. A younger, unmarried woman posed carelessly on the black piano bench in an effort to exaggerate the charms of her body, spoke with a deliberate sigh.
"No, I don't agree with you, Mr. Harlan. Women are capable of sacrifice."
She thrust forward a lavender-stockinged leg and contemplated it with a far-away sacrificial light in her eyes. The red-faced one observed her with sudden owlish seriousness. His argument seemed routed.
"Of course that's true," he agreed. Mr. Harlan came of a race whose revolutionary notions expired apologetically before the first platitude to cross their path. "We must always bear in mind that women are capable of sacrifice; that women ..." The lavender stocking was withdrawing itself and Mr. Harlan stammered like anorator witnessing a sudden exodus of his audience, "that women are really capable of remarkable things," he concluded.
Dorn was an uncommonly clever fellow, but a bit radical. He'd like to think of something to say to him just to show him there was another side to it. Not that he gave a damn. Some other time would do. The red face turned with a great attentiveness toward the hoarsely oracular Mr. Warren, his eyes dropping a furtive curtsy in the direction of the vanished stocking.
"I never agree with Dorn," Warren was remarking, "for fear of displeasing him."
He gazed belligerently at Anna whose eyes were attracting attention. She was watching her husband in a manner unbecoming a hostess. A middle-aged youth toying politely with the blue sash of a girl in a white dress—he had recently concluded a tense examination of the two antique rings on her fingers—saw an occasion for laughter and embraced it. The girl glanced somewhat timidly toward Anna and addressed her softly, as if desiring to engage in some conversation beyond the superficial excitement of the moment.
"I'm just mad about blue sashes," she whispered. "I think the sash is coming back, don't you?"
Anna nodded her head. Erik had resumed his talk, his eyes still on her.
"Women are two things—theory and fact," he was saying. "The theory of them demands war.If we get into this squabble you'll find them cheering the loudest and waving the most flags. War is something that kills men; therefore, it is piquantly desirable to their subconscious hate of our sex." He smiled openly at Anna. "It's also something that plays up the valor and superiority of man and therefore offers a vindication for her submission to him."
"Oh," the lavender stocking was indignantly in evidence, "how awful!"
Dorn waited until the young woman had shifted her hips into a more protesting outline.
"I agree," the red face chimed in. "It's nonsense. Dorn's full of clever nonsense. I quite agree with you, Miss Dillingham." Miss Dillingham was the lavender stocking. The wife of the red face fidgeted, politely ominous. She announced pertly:
"I agree with what Mr. Dorn says." Which announcement her husband properly translated into a warning and a threat of future conversation on the theme, "You never pay any attention to me when there's anybody else around."
Dorn continued, "And it gives them a sense of generalities. Women live crowded between the narrow horizons of sex. They don't share in life. It's very sad, isn't it, Miss Williams?" Miss Williams removed her sash gently from the hands of the elderly youth and pouted. She was always indignant when men addressed her seriously. Itgave her an uncomfortable feeling that they were making fun of her.
"Oh, I don't know," she answered. The elderly youth nodded his head enthusiastically and whispered close to her ear, "Exactly."
"The things that are an entirety to women," pursued Dorn, "milk bottles, butcher bills, babies, cleaning days, hello and good-bye kisses, are merely gestures to their husbands. So in a war they find themselves able to share what is known as the larger horizon of the male. One way is through sacrifice. They sacrifice their sons, lovers, husbands, uncles, and fathers with a high, firm spirit, announcing to the press that they are only sorry their supply of relatives is limited. The sacrificing brings them in contact with the world in which their males live. That's the theory of it."
Anna's smile continued to deny itself to his words. It said to him, "What does it matter what you say? I love you." And yet there was a thought behind it holding itself aloof.
"But the fact of woman is always denying her theory," he added. "That's what makes her confusing. The fact of her weeps at departures, shell shocks, amputations; grows timid and organizes pacifist societies. It's a case of sex instinct versus the personal complex."
The elderly young man straightened in his chair, removing his eyes from Miss Williams with the air of one returning to masculine worldliness.
"I don't know about that," he said. "It's allvery well to talk about such things flippantly. But when the time comes, we must admit ..."
"That talk is foolish," interrupted Warren. He looked at Rachel and laughed. "As a matter of fact, if anybody else but Dorn said it, I'd believe it. But I never believe Dorn. Do you, Miss Laskin?"
Rachel answered, "Yes."
Dorn, piqued by the continual silence of his wife, felt a sudden discomfiture at the sound of Rachel's voice. Was Anna aware he was talking to her so as to avoid talking to Rachel? Perhaps. But Rachel's presence was diluted by the company. He caught a glimpse of her dark eyes opened towards him, and for a moment felt his words disintegrate. He continued hurriedly:
"War, in a way, is a noble business, in that it reduces us to a biological sanity—much the same as does Miss Dillingham's lavender stocking!"
The company swallowed this with an abrupt stiffening of necks. Isaac Dorn, who had been airing himself on the veranda, relieved a tension by appearing in the doorway and moving quietly toward an unoccupied chair. Anna reached her hand to the old man's and held it kindly. Miss Dillingham, surveying the stretch of hose which had been honored in her host's conversation, raised her eyes and replied quietly:
"Mr. Dorn is too clever to be really insulting."
The red-faced one clung to a sense of outrage. His cheeks had grown slightly distended, and withthe grimace of indignant virtue bristling on his face, he turned the expression toward his wife for approval. She nodded her head and tightened the thin line of her lips.
"I only meant," laughed Dorn, "that it reduces us to the sort of sanity that wipes out the absurd, artificial notions of morality that keep cluttering up the thought of the race. War reminds us that civilization and murder are compatible. Lavender stockings, speaking in generalities, are reminders that good and evil walk on equally comely legs."
Mr. Harlan, having registered indignation, now struggled vainly against the preenings of his wit, and finally succumbed.
"In these days you can't tell Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's lady apart by their stockings, eh?" He hammered his point home with a laugh. Warren winked at Rachel as if to inform her of the mixed company they were in, and Mrs. Harlan endeavored to put an end to the isolated merriment of her husband with a "John, you're impossible!" The elderly youth, conscious of himself as the escort of a young virgin, lowered his eyes modestly to her ankles. Dorn, watching his wife's smile deepen, nodded his head at her. He knew her momentary thought. She labored under the pleasing conviction that his risqué remarks were invariably inspired by memories of her.
"Barring, of course, the unembattled stay-at-homes," he continued. "The sanity of battlefields is in direct ratio to the insanity of the non-combatants. You can see it already in the press. We who stay at home endeavor to excuse the crime of war by attaching ludicrous ideals and purposes to its result. Thus every war is to its non-combatants a holy war. And we get a swivel-chair collection of nincompoops raving weirdly, as the casualty lists pour in, of humanity and democracy. It hasn't come yet, but it will."
"Then you don't believe in war?" said the red face, emerging triumphantly upon respectable ground.
"As a phenomenon inspired by ideals or resulting in anything more satisfactory than a wholesale loss of life, war is always a joke," Dorn answered. He wondered whether Rachel was considering him a pompous ass. "I have a whole-hearted respect for it, however, as a biological excitement."
The blue sash winced primly at the word biological, and appealed to her escort to protect her somehow from the indecencies of life. The elderly youth answered her appeal with a tightening of his features.
"War isn't biological," he retorted in her behalf.
Dorn, wearying of his talk, waited for some one of the company to relieve him of the burden. But the elderly youth had subsided, and fulfilling his functions as host—a business of diverting visitors from the fact that there was no reason for their presence in his home—Dorn was forced to continue:
"I can conceive of no better or saner way to diethan crawling around in the mud, shrieking like a savage, and assisting blindly in the depopulation of an enemy. But unless a man is forced to fight, I can conceive of nothing more horrible than war. Don't you think that, Anna?"
"You know what I think, Erik," she answered. "I hate it."
He was startled by a sudden similarity between Rachel and Anna. She too was looking at him with the indignant aloofness of his wife—with a rapt attention seemingly beyond the sound of his words. He caught the two women turn and smile to each other with an understanding that left him a stranger to both. He thought quickly, "Anna is the only one in the room intelligent enough for Rachel to understand." He felt a momentary pride in his wife, and wondered.
As the conversation, playing with the theme of war, spread itself in spasmodic blurs about the room, bursting in little crescendoes of conviction, pronouncements, suddenly serious and inviolable truths, Dorn found himself listening excitedly. An unusual energy pumped notions into his thought. But it was impossible to give vent to ideas before this collection of comedians. He desired to look at Rachel, but kept his eyes away. If they were alone, he could talk. He permitted himself the luxury of an explosive silence.
He sat for a time thinking. "Curious! She knows I have things to say to her. They are unimportant but I can say them to no one else.She knows I avoid looking at her. There must be something—an attraction. She's a fool. I don't know. I should have put an end to our walks long ago."
His vocabulary, marshaling itself under a surprising force, charged with a rush through his thought. Sentences unrelated, bizarre combinations of words—a kaleidoscopic procession of astounding ideas—art, life, war, streets, people—he knew what they were all about. An illumination like a verbal ecstacy spread itself through him. Under it he continued to think as if with a separate set of words, "I don't know. She isn't beautiful. A stupid, nervous little girl. But it hasn't anything to do with her. It's something in me."
He stood up, his eyes unsmiling, and surveyed the animated faces as from a distance. Paper faces and paper eyes—fluttering masks suspended politely above fabrics that lounged in chairs. They were unreal—too unreal even to talk to. Beyond these figures in the room and the noises they made, lay something that was not unreal. It pulled at the sleep in him. He stood as if arrested by his own silence. The night outside the window came into his eyes, covering the words in his brain and leaving him alone.
He heard Anna speaking.
"What are you thinking about, Erik?"
Her eyes seemed to him laden with forebodings. Yet she was smiling. There was something thatmade her afraid. He turned toward Rachel and found her standing as if in imitation of himself, her face lifted toward the window, the taut line of her neck an attitude that brought him the image of a white bird's wing soaring. He felt himself unable to speak, as if a hand had been laid threateningly on his throat. Rachel was indiscreet to stand that way, to look that way. There was no mistaking. His thought, shaking itself free of words ... "In love with me. In love with me!" He paused. A bewildering sense of infidelity. But he had done nothing—only walk with her a few afternoons. And talk. "A stupid, nervous little girl." It was some sort of game, not serious necessarily. He stepped abstractedly toward his wife, aware that the conversation had flattened.
"I wasn't thinking," he answered, searching guiltily for an epigram. "Won't you play?"
Anna stood up and brought her eyes to a level with his own. Again the light of foreboding, of unrevealed shadows flashed at him out of her smile. She understood something not clear in his own head; nor in hers. He grasped her hand as she passed and with a dolorous grimace of his heart felt it unresponsive in his fingers.
Anna was playing from a piano score ofParsifal. The music dropped a curtain. Dorn became conscious of himself in an overheated room surrounded by a group of awed and saccharine faces. Rachel was smiling at him with a meaning that heseemed to have forgotten. He stared back, pleasantly aware that a familiar sneer had returned to his eyes. In a corner his father sat watching Anna and he noticed that the old man's watery eyes turned in, as if gazing at images in his own thought. His father's smile, as always, touched Dorn with an irritation, and he hurried from it.
The others were more amusing. The spectacle of the faces wilting into maudlin abstractions under the caress of the music brought a grin to him. The sounds had drugged the polite little masks and left them poised morosely in a sleepy dream. The lavender stocking crept tenderly into evidence. The owlish glasses focused with noncommittal stoicism in its direction. The blue sash looked worried and the raised eyebrows of the elderly youth asked unhappy questions. Music made people sad and caused sighs to trickle from their ludicrously inanimate features. Melting hearts under lacquered skins, dissolving little whimpers under perfunctory attitudes.
He remembered his own mood of a few moments ago, and explained to himself. Something had given him a dream. The night shining through the window, the curve of Rachel's neck. Rachel ... Rachel ... He grew suddenly sick with the refrain of her name. It said itself longingly in his thought as if there was a meaning beyond it.
The playing had stopped. The listeners appeared to be lingering dejectedly among its echoes. Rachel slipped quickly to her feet, her arms thrustback as if she were poised for running. She passed abruptly across the room. Her behavior startled him. The faces looked at her curiously. She was running away.
Anna followed her quietly into the vestibule and the company burst into an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed breathless, her head squirming under the necessity of having to remain for another moment before the eyes of the people in the room.
"I must go," she said suddenly. Her hand extended itself to Anna. A frightened smile widened her mouth. Dorn felt her eyes center excitedly on him. A confused desire to speak kept him silent. He stood up and entered the hall to play his little part as host. But Rachel was gone. The door had closed behind her and he stared at the panels, feeling that the house had emptied itself. Things were normal again. Anna was speaking to her guests, smoothly garrulous. They were putting on hats and saying good-bye. They would have to hurry to escape the rain. He assisted with wraps, his eyes furtively watching the door as if he expected to see it open again, with Rachel returning.
"I've really had a wonderful time," the lavender stocking was shrilling. He became solicitous and followed her to the door, walking with her downthe housesteps. A moist summer night, promising rain.
But the street was empty of Rachel, and he returned.
They were in their bedroom undressing. Outside, the night rustled with an approaching storm. On the closed windows the rain began a rattle of water. A wind filled the darkness.
"What makes you act so strangely to-night, Erik?"
She looked at him as she stood uncovering herself. She desired to speak with a disarming casualness. Instead, her words came with a sound of tears in them. He was always strange—always going away from her until she had to close her eyes and love in the dark without trying to see him. Now he might go to war and be killed. Something would happen. "Something ... something ..." kept murmuring itself in her thought.
"I love to hear you play to a crowd," he answered good-humoredly.
"Why?" She could not get the languor out of her voice.
"When people listen to music it always reminds me we are descended from fish. God, what dolts! Minds like soft-bodied sea growths. I can actually see them sometimes."
"You always dislike my friends."
She would argue with him, and in his anger his strangeness would go away.
"Your friends?" He seemed pleased at the chance of growing angry. "Allow me to point out to you that the assemblage to-night had the distinction of being my friends. I discovered the collection. I brought them to the house first."
"They think you're wonderful." She would get him angry that way.
"A virtue, I admit. But it doesn't excuse their other stupidities."
They seemed to have nothing to argue about. Anna loosened her hair. The sight of it rolling in glistening bronzes and reds from her head invariably gave her a desire to cover Erik's face in it. With his face buried in the disordered masses of her hair she would feel an exquisite fullness of love.
"You don't think Rachel stupid, do you?"
Dorn felt a relief at the sound of her name. His thought was full of her, but he had been afraid to talk.
"Miss Laskin," he replied, concealing his eagerness for the topic with a drawl, "is partially insane."
"Yes, you like insane people, though. I can always tell when you like people. You never pay any attention to them then, but sort of come hanging around me—as if you were apologizing to yourself for liking them, and doing penance. Or you call them names."
"Miss Laskin," Dorn answered, delighted toprotract the conversation, "is a vivid sort of imbecile suffering from vacuous complexities. An hour alone in a room with her would drive even a philosopher to madness. She's one of the kind of people given to inappropriate silences. She reminds me of an emotion undergoing a major operation. Good Lord, Anna, don't tell me you're jealous of her?"
It was immaterial whether he denounced or upheld Rachel. To talk of her even with indignation was a delight.
Thunder rolled, and he became silent. Anna turned her nakedness to him. Her eyes, grown dark, beheld a yearning and a sorrow.
"Don't talk about people," she whispered. "I'm glad you hate them—all of them."
Her nudity always surprised Dorn. Her body seemed always to have grown more beautiful and impersonal. A shout of rain sounded in the night and a chill wind burst with a clatter in the darkness. He thought of Rachel as he darkened the room. There came to him a picture of her walking in the rain with her head raised and laughing.
Anna lay for a moment, awed by the suddenness of the storm. She turned quickly, her arms reaching hungrily about her husband.
"I love you," she whispered. "Oh, I love you so much. My own, my dearest!"
She felt his lips touch hers, and closed her eyes.
"Tell me...."
Dorn murmured back to her, "I adore you."
A little laugh came, and tears reached her cheeks.
"You're so wonderful," she whispered. "Think of it! It's been the same since the first night. You love me—just as you did."
She paused questioningly—an old question to which he gave an old answer.
"I love you more."
"I know it. I can feel it. You won't ever get tired of loving me?"
"Never—never as long as I live."
"Oh, you make me so happy!"
A sigh almost like a moan came from her heart.
"Oh, I'm a fool. I get frightened sometimes—when I hear you talk. Something takes you away. You mustn't ever go away. Promise me. Listen, Erik." She dropped into a panic. "Promise me you won't go to war."
He laughed.
"That was only talk," he whispered. "You should know my talk by this time."
"I'll never know you."
"Please, Anna, don't. You hurt me when you say that."
"And when you were silent," she went on softly, "I felt—I felt something had happened. Erik, darling Erik. Oh, you're my whole life!"
"I adore you, sweetest," he murmured.
"I don't live except in you, Erik. And, oh, I'm a fool. Such a fool!"
"You're wonderful," he interrupted. He was making responses in an old ritual.
"No, I'm not. I'll make you tired of me. Tell me, please. Tell me you love me. I feel you've never told me it."
"I love you more than everything else in life. More than everything."
"Oh, do you, Erik?"
She pressed herself closer to him, and he felt her body like the heat of a flame avidly caress him.
"I don't want you any different, though," she whispered. "When I see other men I get horrified to think that you might become like them—if you didn't love me. Dead, creepy things. Oh, men are horrible. Talk to me, Erik."
"I can't. I love you. What else is there to say?" His voice trembled and her mouth pressed upon his.
"I don't deserve such happiness," she said. Tears from her eyes fell like warm wax on his shoulder. Her hands were fumbling distractedly over him.
"Erik," she gasped, "my Erik! I worship you."
The storm pounded through the night, leaping and bellowing in a halloo of sounds. Dorn tightened his arms mechanically about her warm flesh. His lips were murmuring tensely, dramatically, "I love you. I love you." And a sadness made a little warmth in his heart. He was alone in the night. His arms and words were engaged in anold make-believe. But this time he felt himself further away. There was no meaning....
He tried vainly to think of Anna, but an emptiness crowded even her name out of his mind. His hands were returning her caresses, mimicking the eager distraction of her own. His mind, removed as if belonging elsewhere, was thinking aimless little words.
There was a storm outside. Lightning.... The war was taking up too much space in the paper. Crowding out important local news. The Germans would probably get to Paris soon and put an end to it.... Why did Rachel run away? Should he ask her? Sometime. When he saw her. Ask her. Ask her.... His thought drifted into a blank. Then it said ... "The thing is meaningless. Meaningless. Houses, faces, streets. Nothing, nothing. There's nothing...."
His wife lay silent, quivering with an ecstasy. Her arms were hungrily choking him. Dorn closed his eyes as if to hide himself. His lips still murmured in a monotone, vague as the voice of a stranger in his ears—responses in an old ritual—"I love you, I love you! Oh, I love you so much!..."
CHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER V
In the evening when women stand washing dishes in the kitchens of the city, men light their tobacco and open newspapers. Later, the women gather up the crumpled sheets and read.
The streets of the city spell easy words—poor, rich—neither.
Here in one part live the grimy-faced workers, their sagging, shapeless women and their litters of children. Their windows open upon broken little streets and bubbling alleys. Idiot-faced wooden houses sprawl over one another with their rumps in the mud. The years hammer away—digesting the paint from houses. The years grind away, yet life persists. Beneath the grinding of the years, life gropes, shrieks, sweats. And in the evening men light their tobacco and open newspapers.
Around a corner the boxes commence. One, two, three, four, and on into thousands stand houses made of stone, and their regimental masonry is like the ticking of a clock. Unvarying windows, doors identical—a stereotype of roofs and chimneys—these hold the homes of the crowds. Here the vague faces of the streets, the hurrying, enigmatic figures pumping in and out of offices and stores gather to sleep and breed.In the evening the crowds drift into boxes. The multiple destinations dwindle suddenly into a monotone. The confusions of the city's traffic; the winding and unwinding herds that made a picture for the eyes of Erik Dorn, individualize into little human solitudes. The stone houses stand ticking away the years, and within them men and women tick. Doors open and shut, lights go on and off, day and night drop a tick-tock across miles of roofs. And in the hour of the washing of dishes men kindle their tobacco and read the newspapers.
Slowly, timidly, the city moves away from the little stone boxes. Automobiles and trees appear. Here begin the ornaments. Marble, bronze, carved and painted brick—a filigree and a scrollwork—put forth claims. The lords of the city stand girthed in ornaments. Knight and satrap have changed somewhat. Moat and battlement grimace but faintly from behind their ornaments. The tick-tock sounds through the carouse. Sleek, suave men and languorous, desirable women sit amid elaborations, sleep and breed in ornamental beds. Power wears new masks. Leadership has improved its table manners, its plumbing, and its God.
Beautiful clocks, massive with griffiens and gargoyles, nymphs and scrollwork—they shelter heroes. But heroes have changed. Destiny no longer passes in the night—a masked horseman riding a lonely road. Instead, an old watchmakerwinds up clocks, sleek men and desirable women. In the inner offices of the city the new heroes sit through the day, watchmakers themselves, winding and unwinding the immemorial crowds with new devices. But in the evening they too return to their ornamental boxes, and under Pompeian lamps, amid Renaissance tapestries, open newspapers.
Alley box and manor, the tick-tock of the city has them all. Paved streets and window-pitted walls beat out a monotone. Lust and dream turn sterile eyes to the night. The great multiple tick-tock of the city waits another hour to pass.
Wait, it reads a newspaper. On the west side of the city a man named Joseph Pryzalski has murdered a woman he loved, beating her head in with an ax, and subsequently cut his own throat with a razor. At the inquest there will be exhibited a note scribbled on a piece of wrapping-paper still redolent with herring ... "God in heaven, forgive me! She is dead. It is better. Oh, God, now my turn!" Deplorable incident.
In the next column the exploits of three young men armed with guns. Entering a bank, the three young men shot and killed Henry J. Sloane, cashier; held half a dozen other names at bay, loaded their pockets with money, and escaped in a black automobile. The police are, fortunately, combing the city for the three young men and the black automobile. Thank God for the police moving cautiously through the streets with alarge, a magnificent comb that will soon pick the three young men, their three guns, and their symbolical black automobile out of the city.
Next, the daily report of excitements in Europe. The Austrian army has been annihilated. A part of the German army, seemingly the most important part, has also been annihilated. Day by day the armies of the Allies continue to devour, obliterate, grind into dust the armies of the Kaiser. Bulletin—black type demanding quick eye—twenty thousand unsuspecting Prussians walking across a bridge on the Meuse were blown up and completely annihilated. This occurred on a Monday. In the teeth of these persistent and vigorous annihilations, the Huns still continue their atrocities. Shame! In Liége, on a Tuesday, the blood-dripping Huns added another horror to their list of revolting crimes. Three citizens of Liége were executed. They died like heroes. There are other items on this general subject, including a message from the Pope.
Alongside the war, as if in a next room, a woman has shot her lover on learning he was a married man. "Beauty Slays Soul-Mate; Shoots Self." ... Annihilation on a smaller but more interesting scale, this.
A street-car has crashed into a brewery wagon and at the bottom of the column a taxi has run over a golden-haired little girl at play.
But why has Raymond S. Cotton, wealthy clubman and financier and prominent in north-shore society circles, disappeared? Society circles are agog. Sometimes society circles are merely disturbed. But they are always active. Society circles are always running around waving lorgnettes and exclaiming, "Dear me, and what do you think of this? I am all agog." The police are combing the city for a woman in black last seen with the prominent Mr. Cotton in a notorious café. But a man is to be hanged in the County Jail. "The doomed man ate a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and seemed in good spirits." Fancy that!
"Flames Destroy Warehouse, Two Firemen Hurt." This, in small apologetic type like a footnote on a timetable. Inconsiderate firemen who take up important space on a crowded day!
Apology ceases. Here is something that requires no apology. It is extremely important. Wilbur Jennings, prominent architect, has defied the world and departed for a Love Bungalow in Minnesota with another man's wife. A picture of Wilbur in flowing bow tie and set jaws defying the world. Also of his inamorata in a ball gown, eyes lowered to a rose drooping from her hand. Various wives and chubby-faced children, and the inamorata's Siberian hound, "Jasper." What he said. What she said. What they said. Opinions of three ministers, roused on the telephone by inquiring reporters. The three divines are unanimous. But Wilbur's tie remains defiant.
Arm in arm with Wilbur, his tie and his troubles, his epigrams and his Love Bungalow, sits an epidemic of clairvoyants. There is an epidemic of clairvoyants in the city. Five widows have been swindled. The police are combing the city for ... a prominent professor of sociology on the faculty of the local university interrupts. The prominent professor has been captured in a leading Loop hotel whither he had gone to divert himself with a suitcase, a handbook on sex hygiene, and an admiring co-ed.
This, waiting for an hour to pass, the city reads. Crimes, scandals, horrors, holocausts, burglaries, arsons, murders, deceptions. The city reads with a vague, dull skepticism. Who are these people of the newspaper columns? Lusting scoundrels, bandits, heroes, wild lovers, madmen? Not in the streets or the houses that tick-tock through the night.... Somewhere else. A troupe of mummers wandering unseen behind the great clock face of the city—an always unknown troupe of rascally mummers for whom the police are continually combing and setting large dragnets.
In the evening men light their tobacco and read the little wooden phrases of the press that squeal and mumble the sagas of the lawbreakers. Women come from the washing of dishes and eating of food and pick up the crumpled pages.... A scavenger digging for the disgusts and abnormalities of life, is the press. A yellow journal of lies, idiocies, filth. Ignoring the wholesome, splendid things of life—the fine, edifying beat of the tick-tock. Yet they read, glancing dully at headlines,devouring monotonously the luridness beneath headlines. They read with an irritation and a vague wonder. Tick, say the streets, and tock, say the houses; and within them men and women tick. To work and home again. Home again and to work. New shoes grow old. New seasons vanish. Years grind. Life sinks slowly away with a tick-tock on its lips.
Yet each evening comes the ragged twopenny minstrel—a blear-eyed, croaking minstrel, and the good folk give him ear. No pretty words in rhythms from his tongue. No mystic cadences quaver in his voice. Yet he comes squealing out his song of an endless "Extra! All about the mysteries and the torments of life. All about the raptures, lusts, and adventures that the day has spilled. Read 'em and weep! Read 'em and laugh! Here's the latest, hot off the presses, from dreamers and lawbreakers. Extra!"
Thus the city sits, baffled by itself, looking out upon a tick-tock of windows and reading with a wonder in its thought, "Who are these people?..."
At ten o'clock the courts of the city crowd up. The important gentlemen who devote themselves to sending people to jail and to preventing them from being sent to jail, appear with fat books under their arms and brief-cases in their hands. They have slept well and eaten well and have arrived at their tasks with clear heads containing arguments. These are arguments vastly more important than poems that writers make or histories that dreamers invent. For they are arrangements of words which function in the absence of God. God is not exactly absent, to be sure, since the memory of Him lingers in the hearts of men. But it is a vague memory and at times unreliable. It would appear that He was on earth only for a short interval and failed to make any decided impression.
Therefore, at ten o'clock, the courts crowd up and the important gentlemen bristling with substitute arrangements of words, address themselves to the daily business of demonstrating whether people have done right or wrong, and proving, or disproving also, how extensive are the sins which have been committed. Arrangements of words palaver with arrangements of words. There ensues a vast shuffling of words, a drone and a gurgle of syllables. The Case of the State of Illinois Versus Man. Order in the Court Room. "No talking, please...." "If it Please Your Honor, the Issue involved in this case is identical with the Issue as explicitly set forth in the Case of Matthews Versus Matthews, Illinois Sixth, Chapter Eight, Page ninety two, in which in the Third Paragraph the Supreme Court decided." The Court Instructs the Jury, "You are to be Guided by the Law as given You in these instructions and by the Facts as admitted in Evidence of the Case; the court Instructs the jury they are the judges of the law as well as of the fact but the Court further instructs the Jury before You decide for Yourselves that the Law is Otherwise than as given you by the Court, you are to exercise great Care and Caution in arriving at your decision...." "Gentlemen, have you arrived at your verdict?" "We have." "Let the clerk be handed the verdict." "We the Jury find the Defendant...."
Thus the tick-tock of the great city grown stern and audible, grown verbose and insistent, speaks aloud in the courts. And here huddled on benches are the little troupes of mummers who have committed crimes. The mysterious sprinkling of marionettes not wound up by the watchmaker. Names that solidify for a moment into the ink headlines. Lusts, dreams, greeds, and manias sitting sad-faced and dolorous-eyed listening to a drone and a gurgle of words. Alas! The evil-doers and the doers of good bear a fatuous resemblance to each other. God Himself might well be confused by this curious fact. But fortunately there are arrangements of words capable of adjusting themselves to confusion, capable of tick-tocking in the midst of disorder. Tick, say the words and tock say the juries. Tick-tock, the cell door and the scaffold drop. Streets and windows, paintings of the Virgin Mary, beds of the fifty-cent prostitutes, cannon at Verdun and police whistles on crossings; the Pope in Rome, the President in Washington, the man hunting the alleys for a handout, the languorous women breeding in ornamental beds—all say a tick-tock. Behind the arrangements of words, confusion strikes a posture of guilt, strikes a posture of innocence. God Himself were a dolt to interfere. For if the song of the angels is somehow other than the tick-tock of men, the song of the angels is a music for heaven and the tick-tock of men is a restful drone in which the city hides the mysteries non-essential to the progress and pattern of its streets.
In and out of the crowded courtrooms of the city George Hazlitt pursued his career. Buried in the babble of words, his voice sounded from day to day with a firm, self-conscious vigor. To the thousand and one droners about him, the law was a remunerative game in which one matched platitude with bromide, legal precedent of the State of Illinois with legal precedent of the State of Indiana; in which right and wrong were a shuffle of words and the wages of sin dependent upon the depth of a counselor's wits.
There was in Hazlitt, however, a puritanical fervor which withstood the lure of expediency. He entered the courts not to juggle with words, fence for loopholes out of which to drag dubious acquittals for his clients. His profession was a part of his nature. He saw it as a battle ground on which, under the babbling and droning, good and evil stood at unending grips. Good always triumphing. Evil always going to jail despite habeas corpuses, writs, and duces tecums.
To question the nobility of the Hazlitt soul would be a sidestepping. There were among his friends, men of dubious integrity with elastic scruples and pliable consciences. But skepticismthrust in vain at the Hazlitt armor. In him had been authentically born the mania for conformity. He was a prosecutor by birth. Against that which did not conform, against all that squirmed for some expression beyond the tick-tock of life, he was a force—an apostle with a sword. Men pretending virtues as relentless as his own were often inclined to eye him askance. Virtue breeds skepticism among the virtuous. But there was a difference about Hazlitt.
The basis of his philosophy was twofold. It embraced a rage against dreamers and a rage against lawbreakers. Lawbreakers were men and women who sacrificed the welfare and safety of the many for the sating of their individual greeds and lusts. He viewed the activities of lawbreakers with a sense of personal outrage. He, Hazlitt, was a part of society—a conscious unit of a state of mind, which state of mind was carefully written out in text-book editorials, and on tablets handed down by God from a mountaintop. Men who robbed, cheated, beat their wives, deserted their families, seduced women, shirked responsibilities, were enemies on his own threshold. They must be punished, mentally, by him; physically by the society to which he belonged.
The punishing of evil-doers did more than eliminate them from his threshold. It vindicated his own virtue. Virtue increases in direct proportion with its ability to distinguish evil. The denunciation of evil-doers was the boasting of GeorgeHazlitt, "I am not one of them." The more vigorous the denunciation, the more vigorous the boast. The hanging of a man for the crime of murder was a reward paid to George Hazlitt for his abstinence from bloodshed. The jailing of a seducer offered a tangible recompense for the self-denial which he, as a non-seducer, practiced.
Apart from the satisfactions his virtue derived in establishing its superiority by assisting spiritually in the punishment of the unvirtuous, his rage against lawbreakers found itself equally on his devotion to law. He perceived in the orderly streets, in the miles of houses, in the smoothly functioning commerce and government of his day, a triumph of man over his baser selves. The baser selves of man were instincts that yearned for disorder. Of this triumph Hazlitt felt himself a part.
Disorder he thought not only illegal, but debasing. The same virtue which prevented him from promenading in his pajamas in the boulevard stirred with a feeling of outrage against the confusion attending a street-car strike. His intelligence, clinging like some militant parasite to the stability of life, resented all agitations, material or spiritual, all violators who violated the equilibrium to which he was fastened.
Against dreamers his rage was even deeper and more a part of his fiber. In the tick-tock of life Hazlitt saw a perfection—an evolution out of centuries of mania and disorder. The tick-tock was a perfection whose basic principle was a respect for others. This respect evolved out of man's fear of man and insuring a mutual protection against his predatory habits, was to Hazlitt a religion. He denied himself pleasures and convenient expressions for his impulses in order to spare others displeasure and inconvenience. And his nature demanded a similar sacrifice of his fellows—as a reward and a symbol of his own correctness. Such explanation of his conduct as, it is easier to follow the desires of others than to give expression to the desires of one's self, would have been, to Hazlitt, spiritual and legal sacrilege.
In dreamers, the rising young attorney sensed a poorly concealed effort to evade this primal responsibility toward him and the society of which he was an inseparable part. Men who walked with their heads in the clouds were certain to step on one's feet. Dreamers were scoundrels or lunatics who sought to justify their unfitness for society by ridiculing it as unworthy and by phantasizing over new values and standards which would be more amiable to their weaknesses. There were political dreamers and dreamers in morals and art. Hazlitt bunched them together, branded them with an identical rage, and spat them out in one word, "nuts."
Dreamers challenged his sense of superiority by hinting at soul states and social states superior to those he already occupied. Dreamers disturbed him. For this he perhaps hated them most. Their phantasies sometimes lifted him into moments of disorder, moments of doubt as revolting to his spirit as were sores revolting to his skin. Then also, dreamers had their champions—men and women who applauded their lunatic writings and cheered their lunatic theories.
The punishment of lawbreakers vindicated his own virtue. But his rage against dreamers was such that their punishing offered him no sense of satisfactory vindication. His railing and ridicule against creatures who yearned, grimaced—neurasthenics, in short—left him with no fine feeling of the victorious sufficiency of himself. Thus to conceal himself from doubts always threatening an appearance, it was necessary for him to assume a viciousness of attitude not entirely sincere. So he read with unction political speeches and art reviews denouncing the phantasts of his day, and from them he borrowed elaborate invective. Yet his invective seemed like a vague defense of himself who should need no defense and thus again doubt raised a dim triumph in his heart.
"Yes, I'm a reactionary," he would say. "I'm for the good old things of life. Things that mean something." And even this definition of faith would leave him unsatisfied.
The paradox of George Hazlitt lay in the fact that he was himself a dreamer. Champions of order and champions of disorder share somewhat in a similarity of imaginative impulses.
Six months had passed since Hazlitt had wept on the stairs as he left Rachel's room. Dry-eyednow and clear-headed, he sat one winter afternoon against his chosen background—the swarm and clutter of a law court. His brief-cases were packed. His law books had been bundled back to his office.
He was waiting beside a vivid-faced young woman who sat twisting a tear-damp handkerchief in her hands. The jury that had listened for three weeks to the tale of the young woman's murder of a hospital interne who had seduced and subsequently refused to marry her, had sauntered out of the jury-box to determine now whether the young woman should be hanged, imprisoned, or liberated. The excitements attending the trial had brought a reaction to Hazlitt. He seemed suddenly to have lost interest in the business of his defense of the wronged young woman. This despite that he had for three weeks maintained a high pitch of rage against the scoundrel who had violated his client and subsequently driven her insane by even more abominable cruelties.
Hazlitt's concluding remarks to the jury on the subject of dishonored womanhood and the merciless bestiality of certain male types had been more than a legal oration. He had expressed himself in it and had spent two full days lost in admiration of the echoes of his bombast.... "Men who follow the vile dictates of their lower natures, who sow the whirlwind and expect to reap the roses thereby; cynical, soulless men who take a woman as one takes a glove, to wear, admire, and discard;depraved men who prowl like demons at the heels of virtue, fawning their ways into the pure heart of innocence and glutting their beastly hungers upon the finest fruits of life—the beauty and sacrifice of a maiden's first love—are such creatures men or fiends, gentlemen of the jury?" And then ... "spurned, taunted by the sneers of one of these vipers, her pleadings answered with laughter and blows of a fist, the soul of Pauline Pollard grew suddenly dark. Where had been sanity, innocence, and love, now came insanity. Her girl's mind—like sweet bells jangled out of tune—brought no longer the high message of reason into her heart. We sitting here in this sunny courtroom, gentlemen, can think and reason. But Pauline Pollard, struggling in the embrace of a leering savage, listening to his fiendish mockeries of her virtue—the virtue he had stolen from her—ah! the soul and brain of Pauline Pollard vanished in a darkness. The law is the law, gentlemen. There is no one respects it more than I. If this girl killed a man coldly and with reason functioning in her mind, she is guilty. Hang her, gentlemen of the jury! But, gentlemen, the law under which we live, you and I and all of us, also says, and says wisely, that a mind not responsible for its acts, a soul whose balance has been destroyed by the shrieking voices of mania, shall not be held guilty...."
The jury that had listened with ill-concealed envy to the recital of the amorous interne's promiscuous exploits, listened to Hazlitt and experienced suddenly a fine rage against the deceased. Out of the young attorney's florid utterings a question fired itself into the minds of the jurors. The deceased had done what they all desired to do, but dared not. This grinning, unscrupulous fiend of a hospital interne had blithely taken what he desired and blithely discarded what he did not desire. The twelve good men and true bethought them of their wives whom they did not desire and yet kept. And of the young women and the things of flesh and spirit they desired with every life-beat in them and yet did not take. Was this terrible denial which, for reasons beyond their incomplete brains, they imposed upon themselves, a meaningless, profitless business? The bland interne was dead and unfortunately beyond their punishment. Yet the fact that he had lived at all called for a protest—some definitely framed expression which would throw a halo about their own submission to women they did not desire, and their own denial to women they did desire. The law, whose arrangements of words are omniscient, provided such a halo.
Dr. Hamel, the interne under discussion, was dead and buried, and therefore, properly speaking, not on trial. Nor yet was Pauline Pollard on trial. The persons on trial were twelve good men and true who were being called upon to decide, somewhat dramatically, whether they were right in living in a manner persistently repugnant tothem; whether somebody else could get away with something which they themselves, not daring to attempt, bitterly identified as sin.
In thirty minutes the still outraged jury was to file in and utter its dignified protest. Pauline Pollard would again be free. And twelve men would return to their homes with a high sense of having meted out justice, not to Pauline or her amorous interne, but to themselves.
Enticing speculation, the yes or no of these twelve men, three days ago. But now Hazlitt sat with an odd indifference in his thought. The crowd waiting avidly for the dramatic moment of the verdict; living vicariously the suspense of the defendant—depressed him. The newspaper reporters buzzing around, forming themselves into relays between the press table and the door, further depressed him. He felt himself somewhere else, and the scene was a reality which intruded.
There was a dream in Hazlitt which sometimes turned itself on like a light and revealed the emptiness of life without Rachel, the emptiness of courtrooms, verdicts, crowds. Yes, even the emptiness of the struggle between good and evil. He sat thinking of her now, contrasting the virginal figure of her with the coarseness of the thing in which he had been engaged. There was something about her ... something ... something. And the old refrain of his dream like a haunting popular ballad, started again here in the crowded courtroom.
He remembered the eyes of Rachel, the quickgestures of her full-grown hands that moved always as in sudden afterthoughts. Virginal was the word that came most often to his thought. Not the virginity that spells a piquant preface to sensualism. She would always be virginal, even after they were married. In his arms she would remain virginal, because there was something in her, something beyond flesh. His heart choked at the memory of it, and his face saddened. Something he could not see or place in a circle of words, that did not exist for his eyes or his thought, and yet that he must follow. Even after he had won her there would be this thing he could not see; that trailed a dream song in his heart and kept him groping toward the far lips of the singer. Yes, they would marry. She had refused to see him twice since the night he had wept on the stair, leaving her. But the memories of that night had adjusted themselves. He had seen love in the eyes of Rachel as he held her hand. She had laughed love to him, given him for an instant the vision of beauty-lighted places waiting for him. The rest had been ... neurasthenia. Thus he had forgotten her words and his tears and the vivid moment when he had seen himself reflected in her eyes as a horror. He had tried twice to see her. He would continue trying, and some day she would again open the door to him, laughing, whispering ... "I'm so lonely. I'm glad you've come." In the meantime he would continue sending her letters. Once each week hehad been writing her, saying he loved her. No answers had come. But this, curiously, did not anger him. He wrote not so much to Rachel as to a dream of her. She remained intact in her silence ... as he knew her ... an aloof, virginal being whose presence in the world was its own song.
There was a commotion. Hazlitt looked about him and saw strange faces light up, strange eyes gleam out of the electric-glowing dusk. Snow was falling outside. Pauline's hand gripped his forearm. Her fingers burned. Raps of a gavel for silence. The judge spoke. A sad-faced man, with a heavy mustache combating his words, stood up in the jury-box and spoke. In a vast silence a clerk beside the judge's bench cleared his voice, moistened his lips, and spoke.
So he had won another case. Pauline was free. Snow outside and rows of lighted windows. She was overwrought. Let her weep for a spell. Snow outside. Three weeks and one day. Everybody seemed happy with the verdict. People were good at heart. A triumph for decency cheered them. People were not revengeful at heart, only decent. Congratulations ... "Thank you, thank you! No, Miss Pollard has nothing to say now. She is too overcome. To-morrow...." The persistent press! What did they expect her to say? Absurd the way they kept interviewing her. The snow would probably tie up traffic. Eat downtown....
"If you're ready, Miss Pollard."
"Oh, I must thank the jurors."
Handshakes. Twelve good men with relaxed faces. "There, there, little woman. Start over. We only did our duty and what was right by you."
Everybody stretched his legs. Mrs. Hamel was sobbing. Well, she was his mother. It would only have satisfied her lower instincts of vengeance to have jailed Pauline.
"All right, Miss Pollard." He took her arm. Curious, what a difference the verdict had made in her. She was a woman like any other woman now.... His overcoat might do for another season.... Pretty girl. Hard to get used to the idea she wasn't a defendant.
"This way, Miss Pollard".... Take her to a cab and send her home. If she'd ever get started. What satisfaction did women find in kissing and hugging each other? "Thank God, Pauline. Oh, I'm so glad".... Girl friends. Well, she'd be back among them in a few days, and in a month or so the thing would be over.
At last! Hazlitt blinked. The whirl of snow and crowds emptying out of buildings gave him a sense for an instant of having stepped into a strange world. The sharp cold restored his wandering energies and a realization of his victory in the courtroom brought him a belated glow. He was young, on an upgrade, able to command success.
Hazlitt felt a sudden lusty kinship toward theswarm of bodies unwinding itself through the snowfall. A contact with other ... a pleasant, comforting contact. What more was life, anyway? A warmth in the heart that came from the knowledge of work well and honestly done. Look the world squarely in the eyes and say, "You have no secrets and I have no secrets. We're friends."
"Shall we go to your office, Mr. Hazlitt?"
Why there? Hazlitt smiled at the young woman. She was free. He patted the gloved hand on his arm and was surprised to see her eyes grow alive with tears.
"I would like to talk to you—now that it's over. I feel lost. Really." She returned his smile as one determined to be brave, though lost.
The snow hid the buildings and left their window lights drifting. Faces passing smiled as if saying, "Hello, we're all together in the same snow with no secrets from each other.... All friends".... Hazlitt walked with the girl through the streets. The traffic and the crowds were intimate friends and he spoke to them by patting Pauline's hand. An all's-well-with-the-world pat.
"Eighth floor, please...."
The elevator jiggled to a stop and they stepped into the corridor. Scrawny-faced women were crawling patiently down the floor. They slopped wet brushes before them, wrung mops out over pails, and crawled an inch farther down the floor. Hazlitt smiled. This, too, was a part of life—keeping the floors of the building scrubbed. He won law cases. Old women scrubbed floors. It fitted into an orderly pattern with a great meaning to its order. He paused for a moment to admire the cleanliness of the washed surface. Homage to the work of others—of old women on their knees scrubbing floors.
"Well, it's all over, Miss Pollard."
She was sitting beside the desk where she had sat the first time they had discussed her defense. Hazlitt, unloading his brief-case, looked at her. Uncommonly pretty. Trusting eyes. What a rotten fellow, the interne!
"I don't know why I wanted to come here." Pauline's eyes stared sadly about the room. "I'm free, but ..." She covered her face and wept.
"Now, now, Miss Pollard!"
"Oh, it's still awful."
"You'll forget soon."
"I'll go away. Somewhere. Alone." A louder sob.
"Please don't cry."
Hazlitt watched her tenderly. The weeping increased. A lonesomeness and a vagueness were in the girl's heart. The tick-tock of the city had a foreign sound. She was a stranger in its streets. There had been something else, and now it was gone. A wilderness, a tension, the familiar face of Frankie Hamel telling her to go to hell one night and stop bothering him with her damned wailing ... and Frankie dying at her feet whispering,"What the devil, Pauline?" Then the trial. Hot and cold hours. A roomful of silent, open-mouthed faces listening to her weep, watching her squirm with proper shame and anguish as she told her story to the jurors ... the details of the abortion. "And then I couldn't stand it. I don't remember what happened. Oh, I loved him! I don't remember. He cursed me. He called me a ... Oh, God, names. Awful names! I told him I was going to kill myself. I couldn't live, disgraced ... without his love. I'd bought a gun to kill myself. And he laughed. I don't remember after that; except that somehow he was ... he was dead. And I wasn't...."
These things were gone. The trial was over and done. Now there was nothing left but the city with its street-cars and offices.
"Oh, everything's so changed," she murmured. Hazlitt stood behind her chair, hand on her shoulder. Poor child! The law could not free her from the remorse for her crime and mistake. Lawlessness carried its own punishment. Virtue its own rewards, sin its own torments.
"You'll forget," he answered softly. The law sometimes punished. But after all this was the real punishment ... beyond the power of the law to mete out. Punishment of sin. Conscience. Poor child! Inexorable fruit of evil. Despair, remorse....
"You must forget. You're young. You can begin over. Please don't cry."
Thus Hazlitt comforted her who was weeping not with remorse for what had been, but that it had gone. No word consciousness stirred her grief. An unintelligible sorrow, it swelled in her heart and filled her with helplessness. Life had gone from her. She was mourning for it. Mourning for a murderess and a sinner who had gone, abandoned her and left her a naked, uninteresting Pauline Pollard again—a nobody surrounded by nobodies. And once it had been different. Lighted faces listening to her in a room. Frankie whispering, "What the devil, Pauline?"
A fresh burst of tears brought Hazlitt in front of her. Gently he moved her hands from her face.
"You mustn't," he began over again.
"Oh, I won't ever be able to...."
"Yes you will, little girl."
"No, no!"
She was standing. Snow outside. Rows of lighted windows drifting. Thoughts slipped out of his head. Traffic probably tied up.
"Please don't cry."
She dropped her head against his shoulder and wept anew. It was nice to have somebody asking her not to cry. It made it easier and more purposeful to weep.